http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3264
Profile of a Killer
By Loretta Napoleoni
November/December 2005
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is the most wanted man in Iraq. How did this high
school dropout tie the United States down in its deadliest conflict
since the Vietnam War? From the slums of Jordan to the battle of
Falluja, this is how it happened.
New face of terror: Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is al Qaeda's top man in Iraq.
Iraqi Government
The world first heard of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi on Feb. 5, 2003. That
was the day that then U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell went to the
United Nations to make the case for the invasion of Iraq. "Iraq today
harbors a deadly terrorist network, headed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, an
associate and collaborator of Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda
lieutenants," Powell told the U.N. Security Council. That information,
we now know, was false. But it laid ground to one of the most powerful
and enduring myths of the war on terrorthe myth of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
That Zarqawi and bin Laden would be mentioned in the same breathand
from an official as senior as Powellprobably shocked no one more than
Zarqawi. There are, after all, hundreds of men just like him
throughout the Arab world, committed jihadists with some penchant for
leading others. Although Zarqawi had demonstrated a zeal for his
cause, there was little about him to suggest that he would catapult to
the top ranks of the world's deadliest terrorists. Uneducated and from
a poor, working-class family, Zarqawi lacked the pedigree,
connections, and financing that marked bin Laden and other senior
leaders of al Qaeda.
But, of course, Zarqawi is no longer a mere foot soldier.
>From New York to London, from Paris to Tokyo, Zarqawi has become the
new face of Islamic terror. He has replaced Saddam Hussein as the
poster boy of evil in the Arab world. He commands a cadre of Iraqi
insurgents that have purportedly carried out many of the barbarous
terrorist attacks in that country since the ousting of Saddam. Now
with a $25 million bounty on his head, this high school dropout from
the slums of Jordan has tied the United States down in its deadliest
conflict since the Vietnam War.
But how did myth become reality? Prior to Sept. 11, 2001, the U.S.
government had never heard the name Zarqawi. The first time U.S.
officials learned of his existence was near the end of 2001, from the
Kurdish secret service. The U.S. government knew little about the
35-year-old Jordanian, but they had much to gain from the creation of
his myth. At the time, Saddam's regime stood accused of possessing
weapons of mass destruction and supporting terrorist outfits. Without
hard proof of the former, Saddam's support of terror was the only
trump card the Bush administration had to convince the world that the
Iraqi dictator had to go. To play it, the administration needed to
demonstrate a link between Saddam and al Qaeda.
Their link was Zarqawi.
Powell's words before the U.N. Security Council now appear to have
been a self-fulfilling prophecy. Whereas Zarqawi was once just a
young, frustrated Islamic radical, the insurgency he now commands
threatens to lead Iraq into civil war. Indeed, his success on Iraq's
frontlines eventually did lead to a link between Iraq and al
Qaedajust not the one the Bush administration had imagined. Almost
two years after Powell's speech, on Dec. 27, 2004, bin Laden named
Zarqawi the emir of al Qaeda in Iraq. Zarqawi's route to this elevated
position in the loose hierarchy of terrorists not only reveals radical
Islam's appeal among the Arab world's poor, but it suggests that the
way terrorists wage war may never be the same again.
THE STRANGER
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was born Ahmad Fadil al-Khalayleh in Zarqa, a
Jordanian city north of Amman, in October 1966. Zarqa's residents have
dubbed the city "the Chicago of the Middle East" for its poverty and
crime. Zarqawi's family belonged to a branch of the Bani Hassan, a
large East Bank Bedouin tribe loyal to Jordan's Hashemite royal
family. Zarqawi grew up in a miserable, working-class neighborhood
where traditional and tribal values mixed badly with the Western
consumerism and rapid modernization of the late 1960s. He attended a
local school and used his neighborhood cemetery as a playground. He
was hardly a star pupil.
His teachers remember him as rebellious and unruly.
At home, Zarqawi was respectful and deeply loved. "He was the apple of
our father's eye," recalls one of his sisters. Zarqawi's father died
in 1984 and, as the family sank deeper into poverty, an 18-year-old
Zarqawi began acting out his frustrations. He dropped out of secondary
school, joined a local gang, began drinking, and turned into a bully.
Not long after, he was arrested for drug possession and sexual
assault. He was convicted and sent to prison.
In Zarqa, as is the case across the Middle East, the worlds of petty
crime and revolutionary Islam constantly crisscrossed on the margins
of societyespecially in prison. And it was in captivity that Zarqawi
received his first jihadist indoctrination. After his release, he
married and began frequenting the al Hussein Ben Ali mosque, a radical
hotbed on the outskirts of Zarqa. Fascinated by the stories of
mujahideen fighters who regularly visited the mosque, he was easily
recruited by a representative of the Arab-Afghan Bureau, the Islamic
organization charged with supplying Arab fighters to participate in
the anti-Soviet jihad. Although the mujahideen were often
troublemakers at home, the status represented a step up on the social
ladder for Zarqawi. In the Middle East, nobody likes a drunken bully,
but everybody respects the mujahideen.
But Zarqawi's hopes of joining the fellowship of the mujahideen proved
to be another bitter disappointment. He arrived in Afghanistan in the
spring of 1989, too late to fight the Soviets' Red Army, which had
begun withdrawing a year earlier. Without connections or anyone to
vouch for him, he felt out of place among the Arab warriors who roamed
the streets of Afghanistan. Indeed, among the hardened lot of
fighters, Zarqawi seemed a sensitive soul. To manifest his uneasiness,
he temporarily changed his name to al Gharib (Arabic for "the
Stranger"). "[He] was a very simple person, normal, looking for truth
in his own way," recalls Hamdi Murad, a former spiritual leader of the
mujahideen and now professor of Islamic studies at the University of
Al-Balqa in Jordan. "You would never have thought that he would
perhaps turn out to be a military leader one day."
Slowly, Zarqawi began to make his own contacts. While working as a
junior employee at the Arab-Afghan Bureau across the border in
Peshawar, he met and befriended a distinguished radical Salafi
thinker, known as Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi. A Palestinian, Maqdisi was
raised in Kuwait, where he studied theology. He moved to Afghanistan
in the 1980s and, as an insider, he understood the complex politics of
the mujahideen. The pair soon began a close friendship that would last
a decade. They were an odd duo, recalls one former mujahid. Maqdisi
was tall, with light hair and blue eyes, a strikingly good-looking
man. Zarqawi had all the physical characteristics of his Bedouin
bloodhe was short in stature, with black hair. Maqdisi taught Zarqawi
the fundamentalist way of thinking. "The Salafist ideology is
primarily a movement of violent rupture with the environment,"
explains Nadine Picaudou, a professor at the National Institute for
Oriental Languages and Civilizations in Paris.
And Zarqawia working-class Bedouin, failed mujahid, and social
misfitwas a man at odds with his environment.
Near the end of 1993, the pair returned to Zarqa and began preaching a
revolutionary creed against the Jordanian regime. A few months later,
in March 1994, Zarqawi and Maqdisi were arrested and subsequently
sentenced to 15 years in prison for creating a clandestine jihadist
group called Bayaat al Imam ("Pledge of Alliance").
PRINCE AMONG PRISONERS
This second captivity unleashed Zarqawi's inner potential in a way his
time in Afghanistan had not. "I think that seven years in jail are
more than enough to reshape the personality of anybody," says one
former al-Suwaqah prison inmate. In prison, Zarqawi endured both
physical and mental torture. He spent more than eight months in
solitary confinement, in the baking heat of the Jordanian desert,
inside a cell that resembled a dog kennel.
Zarqawi's metamorphosis was both physical and mental. Fellow inmates
remember him exercising constantly, lifting whatever he could use as
weights, including buckets of rocks. He lost his slender figure and
became massive. That physique accompanied a mental toughness. "[He
wanted] to learn the holy Koran by heart," recalls Faiq al Shawish,
Zarqawi's cell mate. "I helped him. He used to recite at least 10
verses a day to me. Zarqawi was relentless when it came to jihad and
learning
. He had the patience to stay up all night, studying a single
issue."
Unlike Maqdisi, a sophisticated intellectual, Zarqawi acted on
instinct. While in prison, and perhaps because of it, his transition
from an ordinary criminal to something more sinister began. His fellow
prisoners may have respected him because he came from the same
unprivileged roots. Or, it may have been the strength he showed to his
captors. Like the leader of a pack of wolves, he was aggressive,
constantly bordering on physical confrontation. "He was tough,
difficult to deal with," admits Sami al Majaali, former head of the
prison authority in Jordan. "We were always careful in approaching
him, especially because he was a real leader, a prince, as the inmates
called him. All the dealings with any of those convicts had to go
through him. If he cooperated, the others would follow suit."
In the spring of 1999, a national amnesty ended Zarqawi's and
Maqdisi's imprisonment.
According to Zarqawi's brother-in-law, Saleh al Hami, he "was not very
happy when he left jail. Somehow, the conditions in prison were better
than those of the easy, nothing-to-do, routine life. I felt that he
was bored. He was dying to get out of this country." Months later, he
left Jordan for Pakistan, intending to link up with jihadists in
Chechnya.
ZARQAWI AND BIN LADEN MEET
Zarqawi never made it to Chechnya. Arrested for having an expired visa
in Pakistan, he reluctantly crossed over to Afghanistan, where the
Taliban was in the sixth year of its fight to take full control of the
country from the Northern Alliance.
Sometime in 2000, in the southern city of Kandahar, Zarqawi finally
met Osama bin Laden. The two men came from opposite corners of Arab
society; one was rich and powerful, the other was a poor social
misfit. Yet both men shared a common aim: the deliverance of Muslims.
The problem was agreeing on a strategy for achieving it. Bin Laden,
from a wealthy Saudi family, in contact all of his life with Arabia's
political elite, had a global, anti-imperialist vision of jihad. He
was focused on the "faraway enemy," the United States, who backed
Muslim regimes he considered corrupt and illegitimate. Zarqawi, a
working-class jihadist who cut his teeth inside Jordan's prisons, was
a revolutionary outlaw. His notion of waging jihad was much closer to
the terrorism of the 1970s and 1980s, embodied in localized groups
such as the Irish Republican Army or Sri Lanka's Tamil Tigers.
That's one reason why, contrary to popular belief, Zarqawi did not
pledge allegiance to bin Laden at that meeting, despite being invited
to join al Qaeda's international terrorist network. Zarqawi's horizon
was limited to what he saw as corrupt Arab regimes, especially his
native home of Jordan. Some experts have found it implausible that
someone as junior as Zarqawi, who was without financial backing, would
refuse bin Laden's offer to join al Qaeda. But those who know the
Jordanian radical say this kind of behavior is perfectly in line with
his personality. "He never followed the orders of others," says a
former member of his camp in Herat. "I never heard him praise anyone
apart from the Prophet [Muhammad], this was Abu Musab's character. He
never followed anyone."
Nor was Zarqawi alone in disagreeing with bin Laden's anti-American
vision of jihad. High-ranking leaders inside al Qaeda shared his
concerns, including Saif al-Adel, the man in charge of al Qaeda's
military operations. Al-Adel encouraged Zarqawi to set up an
independent terrorist training camp. Following this advice, Zarqawi
moved to northwestern Afghanistan, to the city of Herat, near the
Iranian border. In the hills there, Zarqawi set up his own training
facility with funding from the Taliban.
Zarqawi wanted the Herat camp to prepare people to go back to Jordan
to carry out suicide missions. The camp was advertised by word of
mouth. Many simply heard of it back in Jordan, met people who had
known Zarqawi, and decided to join. In early 2002, after the fall of
the Taliban regime at the hands of U.S. forces, Zarqawi fled to Iraqi
Kurdistan, where he established additional camps. He was anticipating
a U.S. invasion of Iraq. After putting a childhood friend in charge of
his camps, he secretly went to Baghdad in the summer of 2002 and began
preparing for battle.
THE MYTH OF ZARQAWI
In the fall of 2001, the Kurdish secret services were the first to
draw American attention to Zarqawi. U.S. authorities didn't recognize
his name, but they immediately got in touch with Jordanian authorities
to find out more.
Zarqawi's list of crimes soon multiplied. In November 2001, joint
U.S.-Jordan investigations accused Zarqawi of being part of the foiled
al Qaeda plot in Jordan during the millennium celebrations in 2000.
In February 2002, he was sentenced in absentia to 15 years in prison
for his involvement in the thwarted attack. They also charged him with
responsibility for the assassination of Yitzhak Snir, an Israeli
citizen, in 2001 and of U.S. diplomat Laurence Foley, who was gunned
down in Amman in 2002. When no hard evidence was produced to back up
these charges, many Middle Eastern journalists and observers believed
that Zarqawi was being framed as a new international terror leader.
After all, all sides had much to gain from the myth of Zarqawi. The
Kurds could use him to convince the United States to bomb jihadist
camps in northern Iraq. The Jordanians could use him to solve the
mystery of a series of terror attacks carried out by local militants.
And the Americans, intent on building their case for attacking Iraq,
could use the shadowy figure of Zarqawi to link Saddam's regime to the
threat posed by al Qaeda.
Powell's February 2003 presentation before the U.N. Security Council
put Zarqawi's name under the spotlight for the first time. Almost
overnight, the Jordanian militant went from being an unknown in the
world of international terrorism to having his fingerprints on scores
of bombing attempts around the world. He was linked to nearly all
major terrorist attacks that took place in the aftermath of 9/11,
including masterminding the creation of al Qaeda cells in Spain,
Germany, and Turkey. He was accused of participating in terrorist
attacks in Casablanca, Madrid, and elsewhere.
Whether Zarqawi had a hand in any of these plots, one thing is
certain: He was preparing himself for battle. "It's naïve to think
that while the U.S. was preparing for its war against Iraq, someone
like [Zarqawi] was not getting ready to fight them there," says the
member of his camp in Herat. "He had been planning for this for a long
time." Planning seems to be one of Zarqawi's strongest skills. He
purposely refrained from carrying out attacks in Iraq until the late
summer of 2003, months after the Shiite insurgency had started.
According to people close to him, Zarqawi did not want to get involved
in, nor did he want to kill Americans during, the war. Zarqawi could
not compete with America's fighter planes, missiles, and high-tech
weapons. So he waited until the occupation and his support network
among the Sunni resistance was fully in place.
Zarqawi's waiting game ended with two attacks in August 2003: a truck
bomb explosion at U.N. headquarters in Baghdad and, days later, a
carful of explosives driven into the Imam Ali mosque by the father of
Zarqawi's second wife. The connection between the two attacks eluded
Western analysts at first. It was a common belief that the conflict in
Iraq was a fight between U.S. forces and their supporters on one side,
and cleric Moqtada al Sadr's Shiite militia and Saddam's loyalists on
the other. But the symbolism of the attacks was well understood by
jihadists. For Zarqawi, the Iraq conflict had two fronts: one was
against coalition forces; the other was against the Shiites.
He had finally managed to grasp bin Laden's definition of the faraway
enemy, the United States. Its presence in Iraq as an occupying power
made it clear to him that the United States was as important a target
as any of the Arab regimes he had grown to hate.
THE EMIR OF AL QAEDA IN IRAQ
Between August 2003 and December 2004, bin Laden and Zarqawi
corresponded frequently. The core of their exchange focused on the
fundamentals of jihad, according to letters that have surfaced in
recent months. Zarqawi was trying to secure bin Laden's blessing for
his actions in Iraq. Why was Zarqawi, who had earlier spurned the al
Qaeda network, so keen to get Osama bin Laden's approval? Contrary to
how Powell had portrayed Zarqawi at the Security Council, he was a
small player in the wider jihadi movement.
As a poor Bedouin from Zarqa, he lacked the religious authority to
rally Iraq's Sunni population around him. He desperately needed
legitimacy. And bin Laden was the only person who could help him
obtain it.
Zarqawi was eager to drive a wedge between the Sunnis and the Shiites.
Otherwise, he feared that the Iraqi insurgency might develop into a
national resistance, with both sects finding common cause. These fears
were confirmed in the spring of 2004, when al Sadr's revolt attracted
admiration among Sunni insurgents. Pictures of the preacher were
plastered on the walls of neighborhoods where Sunnis lived.
In his correspondence with bin Laden, Zarqawi relentlessly stressed
the need to prevent Iraqi Shiites and Sunnis from uniting around a
genuine nationalism. If this were to happen, he concluded, the
jihadists would be cut out because they were foreigners and the
insurgency would become a national undertaking.
It may be hard to believe that a simple man from Zarqa could produce
such a sophisticated political analysis of the new Iraq. Many experts
believe that better-educated jihadists have joined his following since
the birth of his myth. Or perhaps, he is still led by his instinct.
Either way, the myth constructed around him is at the root of his
transformation into a political leader. With bin Laden trapped on the
border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, Zarqawi fast became the new
symbolic leader of the fight against America and a magnet for whoever
was looking to be part of that struggle.
On April 5, 2004, Zarqawi wrote to bin Laden that he had two options:
stay in Iraq and confront the opposition of some Iraqis to his
methods, or leave and search for another country in which to wage the
jihad. Four days later, he kidnapped and beheaded American citizen
Nicholas Berg. This was the first of several brutal executions
broadcast on the Internet that took place from April to November 2004.
These terrorist acts were part of Zarqawi's response to the American
military push inside the Sunni Triangle and, in particular, against
Falluja. They were a clear signal for bin Laden that he had decided to
stay, with or without his approval.
In a communiqué broadcast by Al Jazeera Satellite Channel on Dec. 27,
2004, a month after the fall of Falluja, bin Laden finally embraced
Zarqawi and agreed to support his fight in Iraq. "The emir mujahid,
the noble brother Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and the groups which have
united with him are the best [of the community of believers]
. We in
al Qaeda welcome your union with us
and so that it be known, the
brother mujahid Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is the emir of the al Qaeda
organization in the land of the Tigris and the Euphrates and the
brothers of the group in the country should swear to him an oath of
obedience."
The anti-American crusade of the Saudi millionaire and the
revolutionary jihad of the Jordanian working-class Bedouin had finally
merged. From the slums of Zarqa to the battle of Falluja, the life of
Zarqawi culminated in his greatest achievementnot his entry into al
Qaeda, but giving the Iraqi jihad a new, revolutionary,
anti-imperialist meaning.
In a sense, it is the very things that make Zarqawi seem most
ordinaryhis humble upbringing, misspent youth, and early
failuresthat make him most frightening. Because, although he may have
some gifts as a leader of men, it is also likely that there are many
more "Zarqawis" capable of filling his place. His rise is a sign that
the jihadist movement is widening and democratizing in the blood and
violence of Iraq. Al Qaeda's old leadership, now trapped inside the
tribal belt between Pakistan and Afghanistan, has apparently accepted
and embraced this changethe transformation from a small, elitist
vanguard to a mass movement. Most likely, this shift for bin Laden and
al Qaeda is one borne of necessity, not a desired change in tactics.
Either way, it surely means that the battlefield will grow wider still.
Loretta Napoleoni is a terrorism expert, author, and novelist. Her
books include Insurgent Iraq: Al-Zarqawi and the New Generation (New
York: Seven Stories Press, 2005), from which this article is drawn,
and Terror Incorporated: Tracing the Dollars Behind the Terror
Networks (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005).
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